


per aspera ad astra

by Anusaya



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-04
Updated: 2011-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-26 20:41:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/287639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anusaya/pseuds/Anusaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>:: through the thorns to the stars ::</p><p>Tsuna and his ordeals with his Mist Guardians, post-Spade fight, pre-Arcobaleno arc.</p>
            </blockquote>





	per aspera ad astra

**Author's Note:**

> I am just not going to be happy until I've written every Mukuro pairing/threesome under the sun.
> 
> This fic is set in the interval of time after Mukuro is freed post-Spade and before he runs off and leaves Chrome. I DON'T REMEMBER/KNOW FOR SURE exactly how long said interval was, so I'm fudging this a bit. It was originally written to try to recalibrate my understanding of how Mukuro's character has changed since the beginning of the series. There are copious references to the drama CDs, "Beyond the Darkness," "Let's Meet in a Nightmare" (think I'm remembering that title correctly), and "Chrome saw it! The happy days in Kokuyou-Land!" -- or at least, the contents sort of allude to the last of those. I'm assuming familiarity with all of those, in any event.
> 
> UHHHH mostly gen, but sort-of 6996, sort-of 2796, and sort-of 6927. I wanted to smush them together for a threesome thing, but TYE Mukuro is just too tsun at this point in time. I will definitely use this material in any kind of more pairing-centric follow-up to this story, however. I KNOW, I SUCK. /o/;

The shuttered, drawn stillness of a hospital room, a resting patient, and another by the bedside who lingers with immovable persistence, and Tsuna doesn’t know why he’s come, but it was only to make sure that they’re all right, but yes, he’s all right; he’s only sleeping, and maybe he ought to go let a little light inside or maybe he doesn’t like light or wouldn’t it hurt his eyes after so long, and would it be all right to bring something, but flowers seem kind of wrong, and anyway –

“Sawada Tsunayoshi.” The red eye cracks open, a weary gaze. And the way Mukuro says it, it could mean anything: _why are you here_ or _did you come to apologize again_ or _what are you bothering me for_ or even _please do come closer so that I may possess you_. “Do you remember?”

“—when I was here and Haru and I-pin-chan tried to perform an exorcism and the nurse got angry at me and then Gokudera-kun brought me bloody flowers because he got run over trying to come see me?”

Chrome tilts her head one way and stares. Mukuro tilts his in another way and sits up, a little. “No,” he says, flatly. “As _interesting_ as that may be.”

 _Interesting_ as if he is taking notes for amusing ideas to enact later, but Tsuna really hopes he’s just imagining that; picturing Mukuro, covered in illusory blood, lotuses in hand --

“Then – no,” he answers honestly, sheepishly. “Sorry.” A moment, and he tries: “Er, what am I supposed to be remembering?”

Mukuro sits up more properly. Chrome adjusts the pillow with such immediate precision that a person has to wonder if an unheard request went between them (it’s a little confusing sometimes, but), but Chrome is just kind of smiling in a winsome happy way at their visitor, as if there’s not anything weird about this at all. Mukuro laughs (like a weirdo), and reaches, awkwardly, for a glass of water on the bedside table; knocks it over with an elbow, and Chrome hands him that, too, and his inhale is a low hiss.

“Your dream,” he says, with strange finality.

“I dream about lots of things."

Like that time he was here and Haru and I-pin-chan tried to perform an exorcism and Gokudera-kun brought him bloody flowers, or about Kyoko-chan stepping out of the shower and reaching for a towel (and he’d felt really bad about that and turned away until she was done, even in the dream), or about being a giant robot, or about Enzio eating the house –

“I shouldn’t think,” Mukuro continues, “that I am so unmemorable."

And then he knows, and his eyes must show it, and Mukuro smiles in a way so that this little sliver of sunlight catches in his eyes, and Tsuna thinks inappropriately of 3-D glasses in a movie theatre, and Mukuro says, "Or perhaps I simply traumatized you too severely for you to recall."

"No," Tsuna says, definitively, and shakes his head. "You didn't -- "

"I must try harder next time, then."

"Er." Throat clearing. "Are you all right?"

He doesn't know why he asked or why he's even here right now (and it'd been sort of awkward convincing the hospital staff he was a _friend_ ), and Reborn probably won't like it when he finds out, and he should be going to see about Enma-kun and Lambo and everyone, but maybe it's just that everyone seemed happy with everyone else, Enma-kun with his family, Vongola with Shimoun, but Mukuro had been lying there in the dirt, alone besides Chrome, and also, your hospital bed says "Corpse" on the patient name, and isn't that kind of sad?

"What a sweet, naive child, as always," Mukuro says, "but shouldn't you be worrying for yourself?"

And Tsuna doesn't know what to say to that; he's just standing in the doorway, not entering, as if there's a magical spell cast on the dim hospital room, where Mukuro has been changed out of the clothing he wore in Vendicare and into the thin papery white of a hospital gown, the white of sheets and pillows, fish belly pale sunlight-deprived flesh, looking too small for the gown and bed, his fingers thin, tapping the covers, bending, creeping like white spiders, and his hair is all messy, and his eyes are tired, and there's no way you could possibly think he looks threatening.

Not like this.

Reborn said, but --

"W-well, I just wanted to say thanks, I guess." Which is kind of not a lie because Mukuro did help some during everything, when he wasn't complaining or talking about how naive and stupid Tsuna was, which he mostly didn't even hear over Spade trying to shatter his bones. "And also to Chrome."

She perks a little, visibly, at the mention of gratitude, and adjusts the stems of the ikebana on the bedside table, anemones and Italian ruscus from the flower shop down the street -- Chrome's idea, though Tsuna half-expects lotus flowers, or even roses or something.

English roses, from all the way over the sea, once upon a time.

"Thank you," she says, warmly, fully, as though she doesn't notice or care that she returns thanks with thanks, not with _you're welcome_ : Chrome, proper but awkward in her courtesies, like long ago cheek kisses.

She busies herself with the thin green lines, smiling to herself like an ancient mystery, all the focus in one eye on what's small and simple and alive.

Mukuro laughs, and it's a river current, ebbing and flowing, familiar like a nightmare, when they met ages ago _there_ , inside of one, and it's the kind of laughter which used to make Tsuna shudder with dread, and now it makes him tense with exasperation, _not again_ , and Mukuro says, "But isn't that backwards? It's you I should be thanking, Vongola. After all -- "

He feels like he should put his hands to his ears, like there's a crashing reverberation somewhere inside of something -- the night in the gymnasium, a pulsing flash of tubes and wires and water, or on the island, a feeling of his coming presence, but no --

There's just the bed, and flower stems, Chrome's index finger and thumb against them, and white, and Mukuro. There's just laughing. Like an incoming shot. You expect it to hurt, but it doesn't at all. Not really even a little.

"I'm in the most opportune position, presently."

Hushed. For what: you know. It doesn't need to be said.

He knows what Mukuro would say because he knows what he always says.

He could know something more of his mind, maybe, but not right now. Please don’t show it to me now.

Chrome opens the window, a little. Sunlight and dust. A blue sky.

Mukuro's eyes half-close in half-shadow, and his mouth forms syllables, a word, _arrivederci_ \-- said to someone, to no one, said to a dream.

~*~

There are those dreams even she does not know.

The next day, Boss brings a card with a smiling face on a yellow sunflower, signed in blocky, scratchy print, large and clumsy kanji, the words -- “Um, sorry I almost destroyed your body!!!” -- hanging over the signature.

Chrome matches it with another card, this depicting a sleeping teddy bear with a bandage over its forehead. She attempts anonymity, slipping the bear next to its cheerful companion of a sunflower while Mukuro is sleeping, no signature and no note but that message which has been prepared by the card company, pleasantly generic well wishes.

“It was here,” she offers, when his eyes open once more.

“I suppose it wandered inside, drawn by the scent of ink,” Mukuro says, and casts a sideways glance at the table of ikebana, sunflower, and bear; small bright things incongruously pretty and at odds with the stark shadows, the flattened white of the hospital.

“Someone brought it,” Chrome tries.

“Honest girl,” he says, and then, distantly, “I told him already that he needn’t apologize.”

Chrome doesn’t know what to say to that, but it makes perfect sense to her why Boss keeps apologizing, and why he hasn’t returned bodily (because Mukuro-sama told him to get out).

Maybe it isn’t her place to speak for him, for either of them, even though she thinks maybe she does understand.

“Isn’t this all nostalgic,” Mukuro says, changing subjects again.

Chrome sleeps in the hospital chair, so straight it hurts her back and cramps her neck, and Mukuro asks her if she dreams of it, of that time when she was in such a place as she now finds herself again, but she does not dream of it. She does not clearly remember the brilliance of pain or the sticky mental fuzz of anaesthesia.

“It feels like an ocean sometimes,” she tells him, referring to that interval of temporal time and space.

It’s cold and distant and it feels like being in the middle of the ocean, when she thinks back to it.

Like being on the moon. It’s dark and forever and empty. Is that what you’re feeling right now, Mukuro-sama? (She hopes not.)

“No, not anymore,” he says, their conversations in whispers in the middle of the night, and his smile is moonlight. “But shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

~*~

What do you do when the dream feels real and the reality feels like a dream?

Once she has placed a cushion behind her aching back, Chrome sleeps upright, head lolling to the side, and dreams of a field of sunflowers with smiling faces. A bandaged bear offers her a ride through the hulking stalks.

“No, thank you,” she says, shaking her head. Implicitly: _I can walk._

So she walks, gently weaving through a road which gradually opens itself, one foot after another on the smooth pathway between the flowers.

In the subconscious sphere, in dreams or in illusions, her mother and step-father are dim figures who scarcely existed. Somewhere, they are living in a beautiful house; somewhere, at some time, they said words which made her heart go cold and forget them.

The truth is, Chrome’s forgiveness is instant, but her attendant forgetfulness is absolute. She can shut someone out without another thought, if it’s necessary.

It’s dark behind her, but their house is lit and lovely, a somber blue tint to the walls, a haunt of maturity. Inside, their voices are businesslike, satisfied; they are structured life in a world of jewelry boxes and fur coats against the snow and ordered furniture in room after room of steady overhead light, an eternal Christmas of the mind.

She passes on.

“It’s what they told me to look forward to, as well,” Mukuro explains, drawing her back into the net of his attention with the strength of voice, and then he is there, too (she is used to this), whacking off the sunflower heads with a particularly large set of hedge clippers and grinning maniacally, as he used to.

The frozen yellow smiles become frowns when they touch the earth, and Mukuro walks over them -- approaching, heedless. Chrome swallows. Bends down and collects them with her fingers, finds that she has a basket to put them in, from nowhere, and inside it, the flowers grow tiny feet and run about like giant insects. Their faces disappear.

“They?” she asks, automatic.

In her dreams, Mukuro-sama is omnipotent, omniscient, exquisite in an ethereal way; a watercolour painting. They live in a land of Monet and soft voices, a little girl’s fairytale.

It’s amazing that anyone could be made of such perfect lines and angles, such gentle smiles and eyes. His clothing does not rumple here, nor does hers.

She sees what he wants her to see. But she knows that. It does not matter.

“Hm.” He avoids direct answer, habitually. A sun hat appears on Mukuro’s head, an ominously perfectly-fitting image, and he doffs it in the direction of the blue-shadowed houses, the quiet Christmases that Chrome has remembered from beyond the years and from beyond the ocean, before her mother and step-father returned to Japan, where her ancestry shows in her skin, eyes, hair. “Although, you know, many people do not own their own houses in every economy. Do you suppose there are ghosts in the attic?” Laughing: “Or flowers? Or _children_?”

In Chrome’s dreams, Mukuro is impossibly disconcerting, should-be-frightening, but always somehow welcome, like a person you have known from before knowing, like a person to whom you can tell anything, any words.

An illusory environment is a soap bubble of safety, free from the fear of reproach. She can say whatever she wants, here. There will be no rebuking tones.

She banishes the houses – her past and her (their? whose?) implicit future – and walks forward.

~*~

There’s Boss -- running out, crashing sunflowers to the ground around him, tripping and falling and scraping his knees and panting, and then rising again, and behind him, Chrome sees the bear.

“Someone make it stop!” he screams. “I don’t want to be eaten or to get accused of animal abuse if I make sure it doesn’t eat me!”

His loudness is different in this place, where it’s usually just been her and Mukuro-sama. Chrome says, “Boss, it’s a dream.”

Mukuro is still gardening, to the side of the others, as well as behind them now, though he pauses to laugh -- clearly, happily, and add, “What’s wrong, Vongola? Don’t you like my rendition of Shakespeare?”

“I made an F in English anyway,” he sobs, raucously but without tears, only that sound in the throat, and the bear paws Tsuna to the ground, and Chrome reaches out and touches its snout with her open, flat palm, at which point it turns with a squeak into a soft stuffed toy.

She reaches beneath it and helps to extract him.

Chrome wonders why he’s come to visit them tonight. She looks at Boss when their fingers separate, rings brushing against one another in passing, and clutches her hands at her waist, twiddling her thumbs and tilting her chin down even as her eye glances up, and Boss scratches the back of his head. Hears her questions, somehow, and says, “I- I don’t really know, either, but it’s kind of scary. Can I go back home, please?”

Chrome leans forward, impossible in a dream as she would not be in life, a phantom, a sylph of hair and light and lips and slender limbs – and she kisses him. This time, only this time, it is on the lips.

Tsuna, for his part, screams more loudly than when he was mauled by the bear.

~*~

Eyelid brushes eyelid, a fraction of time, and then the girl’s body shifts, lengthens abruptly and relinquishes its softness, and Mukuro’s mouth is mere inches from Tsuna’s, as if he might move a little closer and breathe the life from the figure that is warm even in this place.

“You shouldn’t be here, Sawada Tsunayoshi,” Mukuro informs him, mustering the illusory pretense of comfort; warning. Hushed, hissing voice – the old sibilance, the serpent’s smile. I’m harmless, it says. Come a little closer. Even if your eyes are questioning. It’s fun, you know, when you are the mouse and I am the cat. I just can’t seem to help myself from being stirred when you move.

With one hand, he summons the trident, and with the other, he grips Tsuna’s chin with the vice of his gloved fingertips – yes, Sawada Tsunayoshi again, the invader of Mukuro’s sanctuary, his peace of mind, even now, bleating, “W-wait, Mukuro! What – “ And the boy is looking backwards, sideways. Looking for the girl, no doubt.

“Knowing her, she’s probably conjured a kitten, or perhaps a rabbit, or even your dear delightful comrade of a bear. She’s in the fields, and otherwise occupied.”

He’s still smiling down at him, inhaling the look of embarrassment, discomfort. Such human things as Mukuro has never known, such human things as do not belong beyond the boundaries of Tsuna’s world, and certainly they have no place here, in theirs, in Mukuro’s.

Mukuro is amused, vaguely, at the old game.

“Wait.” Tsuna holds out his hands. And more steadily, as though this is becoming routine: “Did you bring me here? I – I don’t think it’s mine, because I was dreaming about – “

Aborted with a blush, so Mukuro could guess, if he cared to.

Human beings are fascinating.

Mukuro does not tell Tsuna that he has rehearsed this since he was a child. He will not confess that, once, long ago, in the house he shared with Lancia, he would write and re-write intricate mappings of the Famiglia Vongola and its allies, its enemies, its history; he would sketch its blood symbols and discourse upon its leaders’ attributes of weapons and personality, the flame Guardians in their idiosyncrasies, with a little boy’s fascination for comic book heroes and villains. Only Mukuro was the hero, or would be, someday. The mafiosi – the villains, yes, but beautifully, complicatedly -- he feared and hated and loved them with the awe of a child.

“Possession is a matter of becoming,” Mukuro says, when the sunflowers grow thorny vines and wrap around Tsuna’s arms and legs, but the boy does not bleed. Not even here will he release that precious ancestry, the only factor which had originally drawn Mukuro out from that first painful imprisonment, bringing him all the way to the here and now -- sacrificing his energy, his time, his life. Mukuro will not admit that he is tired.

“I don’t understand,” Tsuna admits, looking awkwardly to his right, coming face to face with a sunflower. He isn’t fighting back. Not yet, because it must not hurt. It’s only an image of what ought to be painful, a metaphor Mukuro does not wish to think too deeply into, and he shakes his own head; hasn’t there been rather a lot of fighting? But the soil will drink down the blood for Chrome’s garden --

“It’s exactly as I said.”

The confused look is a reward, each time. Mukuro likes being vague, untouchable. A mystery. A monster beneath the bed. Tsuna is the perfect victim. Compassionate, like Chrome; yes, they’re similar creatures, and Mukuro has considered this, as a means of understanding one and the other, but she is perfectly at ease with surreality, with Mukuro, with this place.

Tsuna battles it with every fiber of his being, attempting to force reality and dream alike into a logical order, precise and known only to him. It’s obnoxious. It’s interesting.

Possession is a matter of becoming. He became them all. Don’t you see? Every life Mukuro has lived in, even for a little while, is a piece of him now. That man who was his senpai (with the booming, compassionate voice, that had confused Mukuro so), back then, and Chrome now, everyones and no ones alike; the mafia, too, for he’s _been them_ , even now; don’t you see? Now, you’re the victim, ready to bleed. I don’t know when my revenge came to this, because you’re younger than I am, and I’m the one to put you on the table, but I’ve not soul enough to question the irony, I’m afraid.

Possession is a matter of becoming. You’ll understand, soon.

“But Mukuro,” Tsuna says, and it’s something of a yell, but not of fear or even of heightened emotions; it is merely Tsuna’s natural outpouring of vocal effort that he places into almost every word he sees fit to say, ripping cleanly through one’s own focused thoughts. “—you’re free now! From them! A-and from him, too. And – even from – “

 _Us_? Is that what you were going to say?

Tsuna doesn’t finish the thought. He won’t. He’s just staring, utterly sincere in his lack of explanation for what should become of them all now, completely honest in his mute and blank acceptance. Not of this world, no (for his senses are still battering it down, fleeing from everything which is normalcy here), but of Chrome, of Mukuro _in spite of_ the thorns, the wild places in their consciousness – and even Mukuro understands that, sees it on his face, and knits his brow at it. Feels his famous composure loosen, if only in increments.

“You’re no saint, of course,” Mukuro says. “They always think that. Or maybe you are. Maybe they were. I don’t know. Does it matter, in the end?"

You are who you are, but you are also _what_ you are, and I’m afraid to me, the latter is more important than the former. Maybe you can’t really understand, but that’s what and who I am, too. Personality is of little consequence; I find they don’t vary much, in most cases, and yours, while intriguing on occasion in its determination in spite of your abject failure, annoys me more often than not.

All things being equal, we wouldn’t be friends, anyway.

Tsuna beats down the flowers with abrupt finality once he has realized that they are not hurting him; the heads droop and wilt and blossom beads of liquid beneath the faux-eyes, and Tsuna scrunches his shoulders and says, “S-sorry,” as if there is something customary about apologizing to a field of flowers.

Mukuro turns. He’s holding hedge clippers. He’s holding a needle to push through Tsuna’s heart and burst it. He’s holding a parasol. He’s holding a trident. He’s holding a khakkhara.

“It’s Chrome’s dream, if you must know,” he says, understanding that Tsuna has already figured out that there can be no real violence between them here. Mukuro is still frowning, somehow.

“Mukuro,” Tsuna says, wide-eyed, like he’s worried (but for whom?).

Mukuro laughs to himself.

And then Chrome wakes up.

~*~

From her nonchalance, you wouldn’t think anyone had been threatening another within her mind – certainly not two such important individuals – but Mukuro half-wonders, amused, if she has forced herself awake to spare them from conflict. She operates mysteriously, his strange girl.

Chrome yawns, simply, and Mukuro says, “It’s still the middle of the night, you realize.”

The truth is.

She looks over, tiredly.

The truth is he doesn’t like this at all.

Chrome rises and goes to the vending machine for candy, returns with a chocolate bar for Mukuro. He finds himself eyeing it, her, with alien amusement, the charmed vacant smile that is not – and it’s not amusement, either, really, or nothing he thinks you would truly term such, were you being honest (let us pause to laugh, dear ones). It’s a plainly smiling unhappiness.

Look how our roles are reversed, he could say (and thinks, and will never say).

Chrome is too kind to comment upon the irony. Perhaps she is too straightforward.

He’s not dead or drowning or locked in darkness.

He’s breathing the free air.

Chrome watches him, expectantly, as though Mukuro has all the answers (but doesn’t he?), as though she hasn’t herself realized it yet – that he’s lying here, still regaining an ability to move, and in far more pain than he will ever express, and dreaming of what he cannot say, of shadowed places underground and needles and a smell not so unlike what he detects here, if faintly; he’s dreaming of a level of possession of which he had never dreamt.

Before, his body was a prisoner, yes, and then, _then_ he was a prisoner within a body that was not his own. A tiny, almost humourous body; ill-suited to him, while his own –

Chrome focuses on candy and cokes. She struggles in silence with an airtight bag of chocolate puffs.

“Turn on the television, Chrome,” Mukuro says, finally, when he can scarcely bear it any longer.

What is it, really? The normalcy of the scene? Here, now, Mukuro cannot control how she or others see him; there are no carefully planned slivers, cryptic moments, his appearances only prolonged enough to give a glimpse of the cards he holds. He’s on his back. Laid bare. Like someone could rise and murder him. Like when he was a child, only they – the ones dealing with them then – they didn’t understand him at all. They saw him but never saw him.

He’ll contact Ken and Chikusa. He’ll be gone in the morning.

He tells Chrome so, because at least it’s something to say.

Something that suggests a plan – yes, that’s it.

The news from earlier in the evening is being repeated now, a recording.

"It's not on there," Chrome says, and her features tighten -- pinch with focus.

"Of course not," Mukuro answers, knowing to what she refers. Vendici, towering black-suited individuals with hidden faces, a dead man from a century before, and age old stories, similar to and yet different from what Mukuro might have imagined when he was a child. Of course there's nothing on the television about people turning into birds or giant explosions or any of that rubbish; did you really think there would be, Chrome?

He laughs a little. Exasperated, delighted, exhausted.

"It was -- " Chrome hesitates. " -- pretty."

~*~

Pretty, was it? You mean that man, Daemon Spade, but what you really mean was his love for that woman with the flowing hair, the angelic face. Pretty. Of course you would say that, wouldn't you? Mukuro remembers with a keen confusion. How had she been responsible for coaxing him to do as he did? Beauty in a body is nothing remarkable to people like us, you know; bodies are bodies, an illusionist can inhabit so many, and there must have been more to her. That man was my predecessor, but more than that, he was my enemy. And it's better to be rid of him; a step closer to my own designs. _Pretty_ , you say, of such a cliche tale. Or maybe you mean she was pretty? I suppose I haven't trained you well. Don't you remember what happened before?

Mukuro gives Chrome the remote control. Tells her to change it to whatever she pleases.

She turns it from the news -- the real world of suicides and murders -- to an idol show, full of singing, full of flamboyant costumes. You could make all this, Mukuro might say. Why are you still impressed?

He half-watches, but watches her, more so.

Don't you remember what happened before? Does it haunt you in places even I can't feel from you -- that feeling of being blank and at his mercy? Do you even know what could have happened to you? I saw it and felt it within you at the time, until I was blank, also.

She looks at him, like she hears. Like she understands. But she can't say a word.

Chrome has no language for the traumatic. Mukuro remembers that first day --

Well. We are alike, aren't we?

(It's rueful, thinking of it like that.)

She can't tell him whether she has waking nightmares of the fear of loss of control. He can't tell her, either. It's pointless to wonder, and he doesn't see why he does; doesn't think that he should, after all.

"Come here," Mukuro says -- abruptly, softly.

Chrome rises. Delicately.

 _Pretty._ Of all the things to say.

What am I to do with you, Chrome?

He beckons, and she climbs, with great hesitance, into the bed, where it won't hurt her spine so terribly, but it's funny that she pauses, that she waits and fumbles about, as if they haven't been in close proximity in their world, as if they haven't, for instance, pressed their lips together a thousand times. Of course. From where else would she ever have gotten that idea?

"It's a little different now," she says, by way of explanation.

"Not at all," Mukuro refutes, a little too quickly for them both. Laughs, turns on his side. Sleeps.

~*~

Tsuna doesn't think much about the dream from before. That night, you see, Lambo blows up his room, so he sleeps in the hallway, and then somehow he wakes up in the bathtub because Fuuta decided to rank the top most indestructible tubs for some reason, although he doesn't know why he's _in_ there, but his pajamas are wet, and even though the print is of trains, I-pin comes in and sees him and thinks he's a sewer monster covered in slugs (and then some towels fall on him, so she thinks he's a mutating sewer monster) because she's near-sighted, so then he has to try to convince her not to attack him and then --

Walking to school with Reborn and Yamamoto and Gokudera-kun, and then everything is pretty normal, but then it's math hour and Gokudera-kun looks a little bored, but focused, and obviously has everything down, and Yamamoto is kind of staring hard, trying, and Tsuna yawns even though he knows he's going to need help with this homework; maybe he'll ask Haru again, but then he lays his head down on the desk and --

~*~

It's in the cafeteria, all the tables and the bright lights overhead, and people holding trays and bags, and that sound like a buzz, like a bunch of people are talking at once, and okay but why is he here and wasn't he supposed to be taking notes about the formulas he didn't understand? Tsuna looks down at his tray, but it's empty. He forgot to get anything? And then he looks up and there, across from him at their table, is Chrome, wearing a Namimori uniform and with nothing on her plate but some chocolate puffs, which she's prodding with a fork and rolling about, and Chrome, what are you doing, you don't eat those with a fork --

"Is that all you're going to eat?" he finds himself asking. "B-but you need proper nutrition -- "

"It is certainly better than hospital fare," Mukuro says, beside her suddenly, and what are you saying, are you saying that because of you or because Chrome was in the hospital too or -- I really don't understand -- "Tell me, Sawada Tsunayoshi. Are you familiar with Freudian theory? Chrome is."

And he actually thinks about it for a moment. Remembers something about phalluses, and -- "Oh, no, I can't read adult magazines." He's fidgeting just thinking about the idea, and stop talking about uncomfortable things, Mukuro. You don't even go here, do you? No, Mukuro is his. No, _friend_ isn't right, but -- "Wait. Where's Gokudera-kun and Yamamoto? And why are you two here? Did you transfer?"

"It's quite the cute look on her, isn't it?" he hears Mukuro say. "Even though I'd rather die than wear the attire of you and your mafiosi cronies."

Mukuro what did you just say. I'm not --

But Tsuna looks up, sees that Mukuro is wearing the green Kokuyo uniform again, even though before he had a new jacket and new pants and boots or something, but this is green like a jungle, and oh no, Hibari-san is going to be angry and they're going to fight and destroy the cafeteria and the school probably --

"Psychoanalysis -- " Mukuro continues, while Tsuna blinks, and, "-- or the study of dreams. What do you suppose people would make of this one? It's yours, after all."

"Well... wait -- Mukuro... ?"

And then he notices what's on _Mukuro's_ plate. It's --

At first he thinks it's a chicken, a cooked one, but _oh no_ , no; it's big and fat and it has wings and feathers and its red and blue eyes are just... _staring_ at Tsuna, glaring, accusing, and then Mukuro sticks a fork in the crown of its head. Dark red blood oozes out, like a wound, and Tsuna feels kind of nauseous, even though he didn't even know you could feel that in a dream.

"I've quite the appetite, after all this time. Surely you understand." And Mukuro is just grinding off chunks of owl with his fork and shoveling them into his mouth, and then Chrome is pouring him a glass of something -- is that juice, is that fruit juice, oh no -- and if this is Tsuna's dream, then why is this happening? ("Well -- " Mukuro says, "Aren't you the one to answer that?")

"Boss," Chrome says. "It's -- nice. Seeing you."

"Oh. Yeah. Nice."

And then Tsuna looks at her plate again (mostly to not look at Mukuro's); sees that it's got a thick, meaty burger (is that beef, though?) on it now instead of chocolate puffs, somehow, and she smiles and says, "Thank you" -- as if _he_ made the hamburger for her -- ? But it is his dream, isn't it? But.

"But I don't know if I can . . . "

She's blushing. Indicating her food with a tilt of the shoulder, like she doesn't know if she can find enough room in her stomach for it all, which is maybe true, because _Chrome_ \--

"Maybe you should try a salad -- "

The hamburger sprouts a curly tail and four legs and stands up.

Begins oinking mouthlessly at nothing in particular.

"Oh, no," Tsuna says.

Chrome picks it up lightly. Hugs it to her chest.

"I want out," he goes on, unheard.

~*~

Anxiety positions this dream hemisphere. Freeze it for a moment. Look at the contours, like a picture frame. Mukuro hums a laugh; partakes of the food and drink which Tsuna’s mind has so generously provided. Dubious nourishment, but who would have expected otherwise?

“A cafeteria is a location of socialization,” Mukuro explains, expert-of-dreams; this mind, not so unlike the other youthful ones within which he’s walked. These feelings – this hot, bubbling world – not new, no, anything but; it’s exquisite, like pain, like grief, like tension, which fuels this dream, this world, this thriving human realm. He sits. Sits, watches Tsuna, watches with his knuckles rapping the flat white board of a dining hall table – twisting the fork so that the skin ruptures and the blood spills, red droplets. This meat is not well done.

And Tsuna looks caught between smiling in (earnest) awkwardness or fretting, frowning, crying. Twitch of muscles. Puddling expressions. Are you really, after so long, the one I came to Japan to encounter? But you’re only just a child.

“You live life as nervous as a rabbit. That’s what it means,” Mukuro explains, patiently-sighing-gentle, for now; playing soft again, now; only for the moment. Not annoyed. Not here, where nothing matters. He eyes the faceless, formless masses of students who pack within the room, their own trays in hand. They move about, grey and ghostly. Mukuro hums. “Why should they matter?”

Tsuna starts as though he’s going to attempt to offer an answer, but then he looks down, looking glum, at his plate, at the empty distance between him and the other two.

“I see.” Mukuro shrugs, eyes narrowed, and beneath his hand, bird bones break. Shatter. Wings crushed. Incipient mess. A carved offering – he presses the plate forward, like a sacrifice, smiling. He’s still holding the knife. “You haven’t an answer. But, then, no one does.”

“Um,” Tsuna says.

Mukuro sees him breathe in.

“I don’t know, really,” Tsuna says. “It’s a cafeteria, I guess?”

“Yes, of course.” Mukuro exhales, the not-reply to Tsuna’s intake of air, as if the possession is already complete, as if he answers for Tsuna’s body in some measure. Action and reaction.

Not an epiphany – Sawada Tsunayoshi, the antithesis thereof. Desirous of simplicity, no transcendent truths, no greater meanings.

It’s a cafeteria. You eat within it. It’s not a manifestation of your fears of socializing, teenage isolation, crowds, your half-realized erotic yearnings (is that the girl you like I see at that other table, like the after-image of a scene during a fire -- smoke-haze, blurred eyes, a blurred girl, water-rippled, shimmering distantly, above all?). I’m not going to stand and drive this knife through your ribs, into your chest. That would be crass. More Kyouya’s style, I suppose.

My style is to offer you this knife. A gift. You understand.

Please, take it, in the name of Vongola. Take it, from my hand, when my hand is your hand. When your hand is my hand. And then drive it into your chest (mine).

Traitorously, to whom.

Mukuro has already died too many times.

There are others within the room besides the three of them, though he cannot discern their natures at a glance. You never really know someone until you’ve been within them, and even then, humans confuse you. Puzzling, trivial creatures.

Didn’t Mukuro, the boy he once was (the boy he once pretended to be), when he was living among those adults of the mafia persuasion (but we remember the red with which that life of this boy ended) once attend a school, such as this? (But there were more roses.)

Didn’t he once sit in a place of eating and daydream beneath the high rafters?

“We all must grow up, sometime,” he says. Remembers a sort of transfer, a second school – far in the east, across the ocean in the abundant greenery of Japan. Not a school you could brag of attending. A school of delinquents, rather, and Mukuro, the star pupil (and breaking it down, picking apart the bodies, minds, hearts of the other boys – those days, before the main conquest). “People can be led astray so easily.”

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Hitsuji.

A great, seeping nostalgia, in this haunted dream of a school. The life and deaths of a boy. The lives of boys. The deaths of boys. Toys.

With a slight cracking sound, Tsuna reaches into his mouth, although he is not eating. Has not been eating.

Fumbling, dislodging, extraction: Tsuna pulls his hand away. Cups the tooth in the palm of his hand. Dazed, then a strangled scream; holding his head, wondering (Mukuro hears, though the boy never says it so articulately) why this happens to him. Another tooth, and another. A bloody breaking gush.

Why, though? Because it’s a dream, of course. “It’s a common motif, isn’t it?” Mukuro explains (certain Tsuna has dreamed of this before). “Tooth loss. I wonder – “

He smiles with the force of memories.

Mukuro’s one lingering connection to Namimori Junior High.

The mark of his presence, and it’s fitting that it appears here, in this dream of the location.

But then beside him, beside Mukuro, Chrome is standing, and patiently, unsmiling, without tears, she leans forward, across the table, and collects the teeth like flower heads for a basket. Picks them up, one by one.

As Mukuro touches his chin, and watches, she presses the bits of bone back into the soft indentations of gum. Reaches all the way into her Boss’s mouth without flinching. Feels him out.

Chrome eases the broken teeth back inside, fitting snugly, and wipes the spilled blood from the table.

~*~

The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him.

No. That’s not really true.

They could explain the damage to the body, but not how it happened, nor why, nor (and this is important) by what dark miracle he’s still alive.

The hospital staff mistook Chrome for a sister, at first.

Let’s see. Broken ribs, punctured lung, ruptured spleen. For a start. What the hell happened to this boy? And where are the parents? ( _Your_ parents, they initially asked about, and she swallowed.)

I don’t know, Chrome could tell them. I think maybe they died. Or I think maybe he killed them. But we don’t really talk about it.

Instead, she says, “Um.”

What must her face look like in those lights, with that closed, helpless expression.

On some level, you must understand, she knows (half-instinctually), that they must think her a sort of idiot. A not-quite-mute, a not very bright girl, because this is how the inarticulate are regarded. It’s not a speech impediment, but Chrome stutters on occasion. Stutters because she’s trying to think how to answer without dropping secrets. His secrets and hers.

She can’t tell them that Mukuro-sama immigrated to Japan from Italy. She won’t tell them that he’s just been released from prison. She actually isn’t certain of his birth name or identity -- he’s never told her, and she certainly would never ask. Why would she?

But then someone whispers to someone, and someone asks someone, and the prison records float over from the Vendici.

Rokudo Mukuro.

Here’s all that we’ve gleaned from studying him.

Just released.

Well, well. Welcome to freedom, young man. Let’s get you fixed up, shall we?

There are nods and murmurs. Understanding that even though his insides have been imploded, he survives because he’s something slightly more than human, or something slightly less, or something to the side of human. The kind of person you want to put under a microscope. Maybe after he’s been treated.

We don’t like hospitals, Chrome wants to explain.

And Mukuro-sama has been having a hard time. His body is like this because a very bad person took it and then grew giant mouths on it, which licked its torso. Boss beat it up, used a massive force and flame technique on it. He had to. (But the internal damage --!)

So we’re worried. _I’m_ worried.

So, please -- just repair everything. Thank you.

But there’s no way she can say any of that, so she just says things like “good luck” and “please” and “thank you” and she tries to patiently nudge their attention towards him, even knowing they both dread a place like this. Even if she doesn’t want to be here, and doesn’t want him here, and he doesn’t want to be here, either. Mukuro-sama doesn’t have to say a word for Chrome to understand that.

She remembers, after all, the words he told her at the beginning of that first meeting between them.

Similar kinds of people. Him and her.

~*~

“Welcome to freedom,” Mukuro says after the morning after the night of the dream with the pig-burger and the teeth.

It’s an echo (deliberate, Chrome knows, and half-mocking, the usual) of the _nice_ sentiments from the adults surrounding them.

It chills her, momentarily, when she realizes he’s not just mimicking them, but that he’s also addressing her.

“Freedom?” She wets her lips. Lets her fingers play with the ruffles of her skirt. This time, it’s Chrome in the doorway, having returned from a little shopping trip for food, for fresh air, but this time, when she comes to see him again, the sunlight is streaming into the hospital room. Chrome hasn’t adjusted the curtains or the shutters or the windows.

It wasn’t her doing, in this instance.

It was Mukuro’s. Here and now.

Mukuro-sama is up and standing, leaning heavily against the corner of wood beneath the glass of the window. Leaning as though he’s trying to push it into the wall; an optical illusion, of a sort. Chrome shakes the errant thought aside.

She has had sufficient training in bodily efforts alongside Mukuro, beneath his tutelage – primarily in the arena of combat, yes, but – and she has moreover shared a body with him long enough to recognize the symptoms of discomfort, in how he holds himself. Like when you clutch a bleeding side. Her fingers twitch. She remains unmoving.

“Of course,” Mukuro-sama says. “I needn’t explain, I trust?”

In spite of his pain, in spite of the gloomy, sterile aura of the hospital, the way it tugs at the places Chrome would rather never re-visit in her consciousness, he looks peaceful, at ease. The light catches his eyes and sets them at brilliant odds with one another.

No, Chrome thinks. No, I understand.

“You’re free,” she says, in the breathless stillness of noon. The world waits.

“And so are you,” he answers.

(Oh. Oh, that. I -- )

~*~

You’ve never thought of yourself as enslaved.

Your master was the one held captive, and held within you, breathing from your lungs, your nose, your mouth. Embodied inside of your skin. Embodied; entombed. Chrome remembers buying food and feeling him taste the flavour of the dissolving sweets. Remembers reading manga and feeling his watchful eyes. The soft eddies of appreciative, play-derisive laughter. Remembers walking anywhere, knowing another set of feet would be by your side. Down the shadowed alleys, or across the brightly lit city streets at the fall of evening.

He was even with you ten years later, when he was an adult and you were –

Not.

“I told you that we’re leaving today,” he reminds her.

He’s standing across the room. Just standing there. Just being a fragment of existence. A real, tangible existence. Hospital gown exchanged for jeans that are one size too baggy, a T-shirt, some tacky ultramarine tie-dye, strands of hair sticking this and that way rebelliously, and bare feet. His toes are a little too large, slightly imperfectly crooked, and Chrome can see elbows where the short sleeves end.

She looks. Looks. Thinks. Wonders.

Was he like this in the fabric of illusions, too?

She thought she had memorized his face, then. His hands, his neck, his scent or absence thereof.

When you wake from a dream, and it’s vivid, at first: burned within your memory, so you are certain you could recite any details from the scene. There’s a flare, a daguerreotype, a photo negative. Neon outlines in darkness, the world during a rainy night.

So it had been: Mukuro’s haloed skin, unnaturally aglow, bordered by strange luminescence, by sensations that were only the brain’s neurons dreaming through a noise of intangible, non-material substance.

But within a moment or two, the dream is gone, abating, and you’re left forgetting all that you knew you would remember. And through the day, it’s only a haunting edge of pleasure or uneasiness that creeps into your waking actions. A slight bit of nothing to tug frowns or smiles at random moments, perhaps as you write your essays in class.

Chrome reaches inside of herself for comparisons. Finds nothing to hold onto. Windblown seeds; dandelion, salsify.

Mukuro packs a plastic bag (inappropriate, in place of a suitcase); stands injured, beautifully vulnerable in the light.

Chrome listens to him breathe.

~*~

You don’t fall in love with a dream.

You don’t dream a second dream of the day that the first dream will end so you can meet in a place beneath the real burning sun.

And if that day comes, you certainly don’t pause, forget yourself in a hiccuping moment of time.

Swallow down all your words.

And say nothing.

Or maybe you do. Maybe that’s what falling in love is. A realization of distances that lead to perfection. An idol. A poster on a wall. An image, or a storybook, or a fairytale, or a figure conjured flawless in your imagination. A distant hill, a distant light, a distant smile; the unknown is needed, if you are to fall in love.

So when you learn it, feel it, touch it, that is the end of the falling.

But the falling is not the end of love.

~*~

Mukuro still has magic, of a sort. He checks himself out of the hospital. The paperwork is a non-issue, impossible, when it shouldn’t be; there are forces at work in the world which will see to his coverage. “We’re on the payroll of the Vongola now, of course,” he jokes, to Chrome, as they stand at the front desk, and he prepares an exit for himself with a few extroverted sweeps of pen and paper and voice. The normalcy is painful. The lobby is filled with tired people, sore people, crying children.

Outside, he shudders, like a bird shaking water from its feathers. Purging the memory of pain and lights and machines. Things neither of them want to know and yet always have. His step is a glide, quickened. At ease, Chrome might say.

The wind is blowing, a little. He shrugs on a jacket from the bag. Shrugs it down when the air slows. Chrome puts on a hoodie; her nose itches. Her face must redden, from the cold and –

Mukuro turns. Laughs, as always. She catches a reflection of herself on the transparent doors of an abandoned building. Bundled above her skirt. Wide-eyed, questioning without questions to ask.

“I think I’d like an ice cream,” Mukuro says. “Or perhaps tea.”

He finds a shop where they can stand outside and order. Complicated six-flavour sundae for Mukuro, swimming in chocolate, and simple two scoops of chocolate and vanilla for Chrome.

She cups her mouth to the coolness. Lips it, body slightly open, no tongue and no teeth.

Are you hurting, she wants to ask.

Are the stitches already healing.

It’s good that the mouth is gone. It looked scary. And your body opening like that –

The ice cream melts as sunshine overtakes the scant cloud cover. Half of a lingering scoop (the chocolate) falls on Chrome’s shoe; staining the shoe, staining the sock.

She repairs it white with a thought.

Feels Mukuro-sama’s gaze.

“You’re becoming more efficient, I see,” he teases. “Now to put your instincts to other uses, hm?”

Battle is buried within the words. The threat of violence hangs over their enclosure of relaxed breathing. Chrome remembers the future. Where I was a child and you were not. Who was that woman that I became? I never saw her in the mirror. Never saw her in portraits. Felt her in a stinging of the cheek, someone’s hand – the one true imprint of Chrome’s legacy, ten years from now.

( (And your arms. They were warm.)

The future: The end of the world. I dreamed about you -- there. Grown-up Mukuro-sama.

The past. A long time ago: I dreamed about a woman. She was. She was beautiful.

(A woman in a mirror or a woman in a portrait.)

But Chrome is just a girl.

(A woman in a mirror or a boy in a mirror.)

But not anymore.

I didn’t see you in the glass. Mukuro-sama. That wasn’t you.

(Bundled up, one eye looking back at her. Lip-biting, nail-biting, wan staring.)

Where you came from. Hell. You showed me, Mukuro-sama. Once. They were going to kill you. They would – they would take your life.

But. Did you ever -- go to classes? Like me? Like Boss? )

“I – “ (She has these thoughts. But her own words, inadequate.) “I’m glad to meet you. The real you.”

It’s too simplistic. It doesn’t cover near-executions, parental abandonment, torture. Hell. It doesn’t encompass a war at the end of a dark world a decade from now and a grudge ten generations before. It doesn’t explain how we felt when we lost our bodies and minds. Again, again, again. When she lived dead and dying; he lived, captive, always reborn anew --

Eating ice cream in the sun. Contradictions.

Mukuro leans close, a patient expression he uses only with those who belong to him, and eases a replacement scoop into Chrome’s cone with the edge of a tiny plastic spoon.

~*~

They purchase _o-inori_ from the local shrine.

Chrome halts as if writing a composition for school. Her greatest wish has been fulfilled already. Biting of the lip.

 _I would like to have this, forever._ A cliche. She deposits the paper, drying black ink marks, ancient priestess smiling down at her with crinkled-around-the-edges eyes. The fading press of Chrome's lips to the corners of her prayer, sealing it. Candles during the day.

"For a religion to which I don't subscribe," Mukuro says, outside, hands in his pockets, and Chrome wonders what it was that he wrote. Sincerity, dishonesty, a half-truth.

They neck in the shade of the nearby forest, its green a contrasting brilliance against the painted red wood of the shrine; leaves and shrubs. Grass prickles Chrome's knees.

Slow but wanting, then hesitant, then scared by the third kiss -- not of him, but of what it is, of what it means. How fast it's moving (but you waited for this, a distanced physical eternity), and someone could see. Mukuro-sama still tastes of ice cream.

He pulls back, abruptly. Chrome breathes. Coughs, and covers her mouth, suddenly embarrassed.

“Do you think that I wrote that I wanted to dominate the world?” Mukuro asks, his own smile reminiscent of the tapestries of gods. Trickster-deities. Playful. Interested. A gleam in the eye.

Did she think that.

Chrome stares at the palms of her open hands, as if to read her own fortune on the lines.

These hands that were his hands.

“I – isn’t it – “ The peripheral vision of her one eye nets an image of the bag Mukuro-sama brought, behind his upraised knee from where he sits beside her. It spills get well cards. The corners poke out, advertising themselves. Chrome had assumed he would trash them. “It’s your wish . . . “

“So I am aware.”

She flushes hotly. Feels silly, foolish, girlish. Somehow warm. In love.

I’m so embarrassed and you make me embarrassed but it’s all right, isn’t it.

“I guess . . . “ she tries anew, “ . . . it’s for you to know, Mukuro-sama.”

He pushes his hair from his face; two fingers sweeping strands aside. His eyes are haunted. His mouth is a hard curve. They could prepare a sheet and sit, like a normal couple, at a picnic or a park bench, but that isn’t right, is it. It’s all mundane, when you’ve been here before, and farther still.

Mukuro takes Chrome’s hand, palm up, and presses his thumb to her fate lines.

“Someday,” he says, “I wonder if you will be so agreeable.”

And maybe it did occur to her that he wrote on that paper that he wanted to dominate the world, to bring ruination to the mafia, to succeed in his childhood dreams. Or maybe she believed he wrote something else.

Maybe she wondered, half-hoping.

He laughs, always softened edges, even in the real world, and the sun cuts through the shadows, and the voice of cicadas, and Chrome closes her eye; simply feels him feeling her, until Mukuro leans over, cupping her face, breath searing her cheek, and whispers –

The words of his prayer, his wish.

~*~

Hey, isn't that Chrome sitting there on that bench --

The sun is setting and Tsuna is still out because Lambo ran away again, and he's been searching everywhere for him, but Haru just called this time and said Lambo is there right now (again), and so Tsuna clutched his head and sighed and got ready to turn around and walk home, but there's Chrome, and is she reading a book or -- ?

"Chrome," Tsuna says, remembering all the dreams and everything lately, how it's been weird; maybe she's doing homework, and he has homework which he's not started on, and does Chrome go to school -- "Um. A-are you all right?"

Maybe she's studying her Italian again, but she's looking down, and no, it's not books she's holding. More like. Flowers.

And she blushes a little and looks away, and then looks back, and then says, "Boss."

But at least they aren't bloody or sunflowers being whacked apart or anything --

"Chrome. Do you need help with that? I just -- " Was walking home and um, you're alone, and where is Mukuro and the others, and is it too forward, offering to walk with you (but you're a girl and not Kyoko-chan and it's just the two of us -- !), but at least it's not like that time when Lambo was at the bench with you and you were saying poo and pee and things girls shouldn't be talking about -- "Where is Mukuro?"

She looks -- blank for a moment, and then shakes her head, and, "It's fine." Stands up. Falls into step beside Tsuna. (Um -- ) "He . . . returned."

"To Kokuyo?"

She nods. Quickly, quickly nodding. "But I stayed behind for this."

He doesn't really understand. But. "Well, do you want to go home, Chrome?" Grinning, so she's smiling back, like they both understand while understanding nothing, and not having any right words. "Because it's getting dark and it's scary at night. It's scary for me, I mean. I -- well, I'll come with you, I guess, if you want . . . "

"It's scary for me, too," she admits. Transitions from blank, firm, to open, vulnerable. Not a dropping of a mask, just being a whole person now. Jittery, frightened Chrome, or Chrome at ease. Just Chrome. "The darkness still scares me."

"Me, too. But you don't have to worry with me! More like . . . "

There's no shame between them, and no judgment.

"You can worry, but it's okay. I don't mind."

And even though Chrome was a part of the scary things, like the dream with the broken teeth and all the flowers, and even Mukuro himself, it's like she's always making things better, and being unafraid, and then being scared when you need someone to be scared with, which is important, too.

He thinks back on how she helped them during that big fight before, the battle with Daemon Spade, and he's thankful, and so is Enma, he knows. And that scary future; well, I guess we were both kids the whole time, so who knows, and it's like maybe there'll be more fighting ahead, but I hope not . . . and anyway . . .

It gets dark on them.

They both wear hoodies in the cold, making them look larger.

The sunset comes and the world is pink and orange breaking through clouds, and the street lamps turn on, and moths and bats float and fly into the sky.

A bat swoops down and Tsuna screams and runs because bats freak him out, and Chrome looks surprised, but rushes to catch up. She doesn't drop her flowers. Holds them carefully.

He wonders a little, but doesn't ask. It's Chrome's business.

"Boss," she says, very pink, and he looks down, and almost screams --

To realize that, when he ran, and she ran behind him, he -- without thinking -- reached back and grabbed her arm. And took her hand.

So they're holding hands, right around sunset, and walking together, and oh no what if Kyoko-chan or someone sees --

Maybe Tsuna should let go.

He looks at Chrome.

She looks at him.

Tsuna doesn't let go.

"I really don't like bats!" he says.

"Yes," Chrome says.

Tsuna shrugs and scrunches up on himself, shivery-like, eyes near to closing through all the smiling. "Hey, Chrome. I-it's good, though, isn't it? That he's free again?"

"You worried about us." And she doesn't sound uncertain at all.

"I guess I still worry, a little."

But is Mukuro afraid of the dark, or afraid of anything? Maybe nothing, or maybe a lot of things. It's hard to know him.

"We ate ice cream and he was happy for a little while, I think," Chrome says.

Candidly, with a tight look, as if it's a huge secret. Eating ice cream. Don't tell anyone.

"I'm glad," Tsuna says. And he is, even if Mukuro gives him the creeps. Creepy people should still be able to enjoy ice cream, or maybe he hasn't been so bad lately. And Mukuro helped them, too. Several times.

"Please," he says, a little more seriously -- "Be careful. Both of you."

The stars are coming out now, but the winds are relaxing, and the night is, finally, warm.

Chrome takes off the hoodie and Tsuna shrugs one shoulder out of his, and as he's freeing himself, she turns and presses against him, her body so soft and hot that he knows he's the one blushing and stammering again, and then she pulls back, re-establishing safe distance.

"It was a hug," she explains.

Chrome. One of these days you have to learn you can't just quietly sneak up on people and ambush them with kisses and hugs and everything and then act like it's nothing and not even surprising! I don't know if that's Mukuro's influence but --

"We're almost there," she says.

"Yeah." And Tsuna looks up at the sky, at the small white moths and nameless stars and the vast open world, here or half a lifetime later; feels the pressure of Chrome's hand, still tightly clutching flowers, her fingers that are smaller than his -- and her smooth palm, cool and dry where his is moist with sweat, and warm. "I guess we are, aren't we?"

Knowing you should let go, but.

He still wonders, as the high smoggy-glassed windows materialize -- (the place out of that first ever nightmare, but it isn't so scary anymore, just a mudslide victim, now) -- what Chrome is doing with those plants.

~*~

A lamb to the slaughter, he comes.

You like the window stains, somehow, even though they should obscure your view. When the girl dropped the ice cream on her sock -- or the blemish of her missing eye -- what are stains and scars besides imprints of life and living, the untidiness of death and injury, the cost of humanity and time. That's how you've come to think of them.

And you can see the both of them clearly. Him, trespassing where he should not be. Her, returning when there is no lingering cause. You, in shadow, out of their mutual sight.

You've lit one candle.

The flame of Vongola, once, was your candle, a light in darkness. A blue sky in a dream not your own. But you've given the girl so many blue skies since, haven't you?

Perhaps it was a mistake. Because you know of her condition; you know many things, and you know what you must soon do, and what you will do, and she will not like it.

Complacency, for one who lives as you do, fosters stagnation. Even death. It would be surprising, were she different in this.

And yet, look with whom she returns.

You've thought about that before.

The truth is.

The truth is, you told her, your female double in this world, what you wished for today.

Your prayer was not for the conquest of the world, for more wars, for love, or for the love of sweets.

As soothing as are Chrome's dreams, as amusing as are Sawada Tsunayoshi's dreams --

What they do not know is, it strengthens the power of illusions, not having dreams of your own. Your thoughts pour into reality, become reality; what REM and the nights do not provide you -- the absence of visions -- must surely overflow in what you bring out during the day, and your mind is what forces reality to alter upon itself.

You see things, sometimes, while sleeping. Hazy images of long before. Always before. There is never an after. The past and all that it means. Nightmare waters.

But you should not have told her, perhaps. Though she will be removed, soon, for a time, for a while, and what will it have mattered.

The truth is --

You prayed, didn't you, for real dreams of your own. You prayed for dreams like theirs.

A normal human being would die without REM, and all humans dream. But you are not a normal human being; maybe not even human at all, because you do not.

And it's tiresome, you know. What the brain does when its REM, its dreaming, is disturbed.

You could wonder if the noise in your head, the always-hiding anger, comes from the force of deprivation, but there's little point, is there. In questioning. The dreams will return to you, maybe. Someday.

But until then --

Until you have them restored to you -- those missing dreams -- it's enough, isn't it.

It's entertaining enough. Visiting her. Or making him flinch.

Until then.

You can smile, out the window, down at them, and continue to imagine, pleasantly, that before you succumb to the hidden dreams, the dreams you have never known (yours, somewhere, everywhere), you will first breathe into hers.

And crush his.

~*~

Walk across the wooden floor --

He catches a splinter in one bare foot. A sharp pain, a stinging, and Mukuro looks down; a misstep, and you bleed, (but he smiles -- then, at least you bleed). Isn't that something.

Opening the door and in she comes, bundle of clothing in her hands like an offered swaddling cloth apropos of nothing, and also in her hands -- ah, strange creature that you are, Chrome. The other, behind her; this isn't hallowed ground, Sawada Tsunayoshi. It's the gate to that place, don't you see. Abandon hope if you would enter here. Mukuro will not remove the wood from his skin before their eyes.

He will smile at neither, gaze focusing to the darkness beyond them, reach to her, take back what is his, and let go of what soon will be. His hand rests on Chrome's wrist; his eyes -- from her to the boy, who inhales, smiles lopsidedly, a wriggling uncertain of itself smile, and Mukuro says,

"But at least they aren't bloody. These."

"The-- oh, the flowers? No, I -- I guess not," Tsuna says, "but I'd better be going, really."

Mukuro does not watch him depart. Hears only vaguely the stumbling, the crunch of leaves and tall grasses in this overgrown piece of the world. Tsuna's presence becomes nothing greater than the heat of Chrome's hand.

Alone, with the other two, the haunt of familiarity, they grow into themselves again. Whole, undisturbed. A pond without ripples.

Mukuro lost weight in that other cold place; faded kilograms sloughed off. Ken pops popcorn. Chikusa pushes his glasses in the slim light and says, only, "It's good to have you returned, Mukuro-sama." And, after a halting, awkward moment: "Chrome."

As if her name, the syllable of it, is a nod. Customary courtesy or sincerity or habit, welcoming what you once despised. Mukuro himself could not entirely say what it means.

Mukuro lays his jacket on the couch. Chrome sits. Looks at him. Voiceless, open, wanting. Eager to be of use. Here you are, both of you, wholly inhabiting a shared space. But how did you come to be. Why are you still here, when your cells separated, broke apart on the most unseen levels.

"Well," Mukuro says, distant-smiling, a world away from human touch, always, "It will get colder tonight, you know. It's that time of year. No insulation, I fear, and little in the way of blankets."

And dark. The fear he's felt inside of her, buried far; ancient, primal, but best she learns. Best she learns to move past that.

"I'm warm," she says, as if it is guaranteed to remain so. "Are you cold, Mukuro-sama?"

He thinks, not anymore.

He thinks, yes.

They lie awake afterwards, after everything, with Ken’s snores a rolling, thunderous undercurrent in the shadowed, pressing room, and Chikusa’s breath, tic-toc steady; you could set a watch to his heartbeat or the movements of his eyelids. Lightning flashes jagged beyond the cracked windows. Chrome curls, pillbug-like, in the sleeping bag she has been given. When Mukuro gets up to make himself hot chocolate, he feels it – an instant, a prickle.

Tiny fingers, acting on instinct, taking hold of his ankle. Plucking the splinter out. Hurts less than a bee sting, and Mukuro stares down at her, half-amused, half-surprised, half-entirely unsurprised: Chrome, cradling the minute bloody fleck in open palms, gazing as if with undue wonder. An aberration, cut from Mukuro’s flesh; but no nails to the wrist, no gaping wound. Nothing sacred. Still, she holds it.

“I had been planning to do that, myself,” he says (adding a touch of gruffness, pretend exasperation at her caretaking). He fixes hot chocolate and milk.

Offers – shoves – a glass in her direction. “Repayment, you might say.”

She sits up, tiredly.

“Do you miss him?”

It’s dry, almost, his voice. The sawdust, years of it, clings within Mukuro’s throat. The air is empty of precipitation, rain or dew or mist.

Better, he thinks, to suffer a parched throat. Better than the Tantalus-thirst of a body’s immersion in water it cannot drink, sucking air through a contraption, a single suffocating thread.

“Do you – “ Sitting on the floor with her, backs to the curtains, Mukuro drapes a hand over one knee. Leans to the side, an almost human pose. An almost baring of the throat. “—wish that he could be here, in every respect?”

Eye glimmering, at the last. Wan, impish grin. A sliver of teeth lit by the stars.

Chrome bundles sheets about herself. But she can never seem to cover her shoulder, which always peeks out, round and white.

Her hair is brushed in such a messy way, messier when her fingers rush through it, that it masks half her face; shadows the rest.

Mukuro can only see the light of that big, big eye of hers. So guileless.

She presses a hand to her chest. Then, the same hand, to Mukuro’s forehead – small, warm, as if examining him for a fever; her little cat-paw hands.

“Here,” she says, “and here.”

“But that’s a myth, you know,” Mukuro says, all teacher, now: “That feelings originate in the heart, if that is what you’re suggesting.”

“It hurts sometimes.”

“Your chest aches,” he corrects.

“People come into lives, I think,” she continues, as if she hasn’t heard a word he’s said. “Into each other’s. Even if they didn’t mean to. And then they’re there. With you.”

"I sought the both of you out," Mukuro reminds her. It's intentional; it always was. You shouldn't think otherwise.

"I know," she says; a breathless, ringing little voice, like a chime, and Mukuro pulls her hand from his forehead, from his skin, as she drinks in silence, then tucks herself back inside, back down.

He realizes, of course.

She never answered his question.

~*~

Perhaps we shall think of this as a means of putting your theory to the test.

I've had more than enough of being one girl's dream and one boy's nightmare.

It's sufficient cause to perplex you, you know. Being an ideal and a monster. Simultaneously. (Although it's less and neither, these days, but once, _once_ \-- )

People come into one another's lives. That's true. But can they leave them, as easily?

Now, that's the part you did not say.

He watches Chrome, in their makeshift home, with her long white arms outstretched in sleep, hands open, curled a little, as if waiting for someone to clutch, someone to make her complete.

Between them, on the floor beside her head, unfurl sprays of flowers.

Hyacinth, the oil to ease nightmares. Lilac, the oil to recall past lives.

Bought with the last of her earnings. As if any earthly thing is of any use for repairing Mukuro's consciousness; as if it's anything more than idle superstition. Always such a literal girl. But they say it's the thought that counts. Her minor, absurd gestures of help.

Down through her body, where she breathes with a piece of him.

Mukuro rubs his eyes in the dark.

We've come full circle, haven't we.

We've come full circle.

Out of the other side of the cycle. Freedom. Freedom. Yours. Mine.

"But you remember, of course -- " Leaning over her, collecting in his hands the petals; crushing, bleeding the oils. "-- what the conclusion of one cycle entails."

It need not be said.

Not when the world turns in circles, twists on its gears.

 _Arrivederci_ , to us all, our dream.

And when the writing is finished, he drops the petals over the candle's fading light, where they burn out, burn to ash, one, then another, until the pile becomes too much, and the glow suffocates, completes itself in the gloom.

* * *

  
ART! :D  


Thank you!!

By [ThePieceofCheese](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ThePieceOfCheese/pseuds/ThePieceOfCheese).


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